Fort Apocalypse

Michael is starting a Atari 2600 Programming/bB wiki: http://www.atariage.com/forums/index.php?s...t&p=1375110 For those that didn't see Michael's post, he is working on the following one for everyone's use. You can sign up on this page by clicking "Join" at the top which sends Michael an email so he can put you on the access list: http://atari2600programming.wikispaces.com/

For those that didn't see Michael's post, he is working on the following one for everyone's use. You can sign up on this page by clicking "Join" at the top which sends Michael an email so he can put you on the access list: http://atari2600programming.wikispaces.com/

Michael, that is great! I was just looking though and they have a space limit at 2 GB for the free version, and it doesn't seem fair to foot you with the bill of anything more than that. I think once images start getting added to it, it could go over that limit quickly. I think we'll see how the 2 GB limit works out for the time being, and I had already intended to upgrade to one of the non-free versions later if need be. As for images, I intend to post GIFs or PNGs, etc.-- whatever image type gives the smallest file size but without losing image quality, depending on the type of image (number of colors, etc.). Michael Awesome! I'm psyched. Looking forward to seeing it evolve and helping out if possible!

I found: http://nocash.emubase.de/2k6specs.htm#controllers It says: Also found it in http://www.io.com/~nickb/atari/doc/stella.txt But I have no idea how that would translate to bB. Anyone have any idea?

Anyone know how can I access each of the four paddle buttons separately? (in bB?) I'm expecting via inline asm somehow since it isn't documented how to do this anywhere. Would be nice if was part of bB.

That's a good idea for the direction (p2dir) var. I'll change from a 4.4 to just using a regular non-decimal 8 bit number and divide/add 1 to get 1-16. For player coordinates though, since there are 4 players the max range of any 8 bit unsigned number is 255, and p2x, p2y, p3x, p3y, p4x, p4y, p5x, and p5y vars represent the coordinates of those then that wouldn't work right? (BTW- the reason the varnames contain 2-5 instead of 0-3 or 1-4 is because originally it mapped to their multisprite player numbers). I did think about just adding 3, 7, or 10 to the player coordinates (p2x, p2y, etc.) and I may end up doing that to save variables. However gameplay will be way too fast I think and won't be very smooth. I could also do 1, 3, 5 for a "slower" speed but that might be really rough looking. I'm guessing that's what I'll have to do in order to save variables for other things.

Great info. Thanks! This would be really helpful to have here: http://www.randomterrain.com/atari-2600-me...ds.html#decimal

I'm having trouble figuring out why the black car is not turning in a circle with the following code. The operations around variable p2dir are not working as expected. Can anyone see what I'm doing wrong? TIA!ultindy500_0.1.bas

Found this site. Haven't tried these on the FB2 but thought people might find it fun to try: http://www.digitpress.com/eastereggs/2600.htm

This is totally awesome! I haven't made much progress with the indy500 game yet, but attached is a demo of how 4 colors can be used as lap counters. Even the logic stuff works. The "game" uses 4 paddles and ends at 10 laps. Please don't make fun of it. ultindy500_0.1.basultindy500_0.1.bin

Here is my setup. Not much here. No mods. I'm betting that most others will be more interesting! The only thing interesting is that there is a big TV on top of the small nightstand holding all of this which could easily collapse at any time.

Thought it might be fun if everyone posted a picture of their FB2 setup, their cart mod, some other FB2 mod, or some other interesting use of their FB2. Competition ends at Sept. 25 at 11:59pm (just to choose an arbitrary date and time). The award is that you will enjoy 19.72 days of being the coolest person in the forum (which by the way is 19d 17h 16m 48s). Competition will be judged by Curt, only if he is interested in judging. Curt can also enter the competition. Curt can pretty much do whatever the hell he wants, since he is the man.

I hope this is still going to happen. My guess is that there will be no news as Curt had said previously until next year. But we're all hopeful that we might get some inkling of what is going on somehow, even if it is just to know the project is still heading to completion (which appears to be the case from those that are in the know).

Have you looked at the sample program and documentation? The scores already have different colors. Sorry, I meant a separate color for each of the four scores.

If you only want to change it on a particular line, I found a hack to do that in early versions of Insane Painter. I think I was setting the one of the TIA registers in bB with a wierd value (0x - I have no idea what bB converted the x into). Then the ball would change the playfield color.

That is very nice of you and anything supporting the community would definitely help! The only thing I'd worry about using that as the sole wiki for this stuff is would it would be maintainable if you or anyone else did this on their own. In other words, would you do regular backups of it and store them offsite with other individuals that would pick it back up if something happened to you, would you have the money to shell out if it had any kind of hardware failure and be able to fix it within a week, would you be keeping an eye on it to make sure no one was filling it up with advertisements or trashing it, and would it stay up indefinitely (in theory- at least no planned end to it). I'm assuming that Atari funds Atariage and that someone would pick up the slack if Atari ever tanked, so I think this would be the best place for it if possible. Mostly just don't want stuff to get lost that lots of people spend time on. those are my thoughts at least...

Michael, that is great! I was just looking though and they have a space limit at 2 GB for the free version, and it doesn't seem fair to foot you with the bill of anything more than that. I think once images start getting added to it, it could go over that limit quickly.

Personally I wouldn't be using this with multisprite. I gave up on multisprite for the Ultimate Indy 500 game because of the lack of possible paddle support. Michael mentioned potentially modifying the kernel to get better vertical resolution of the playfield, but for now I'd still be really interested in a 4 score minikernel. If there were a way to have colors with those scores that would be even better, but they definitely wouldn't be necessary. They would be my lap counters, so they would be as functional within the game as they would be for display purposes. Thanks for doing this!

Not that I could personally help, but I think if you want help, you'll need to post some pictures that show the exact current state of things as clearly as possible.

For those that missed it, there is a guy that had his students create a bunch of bB games here: http://www.bogost.com/games/student_atari_games.shtml All of these look really cool! The topic to reply to about these is here

I was having a hard time trying to figure out how to rotate my player definition 22.5 degrees and found this page that describes a decent way to rotate "pixel art" (in this case, player sprite definitions): http://www.wesnoth.org/wiki/Rotate_Pixel_A...ithout_Blurring Basically the idea is to do the following (I used Paint Shop Pro, but other apps probably work just as well or better): 1 ) Create a canvas of the size of the player 2 ) Zoom in a lot 3 ) Use a 1 pixel paint brush to create the image (and make sure your foreground and background are right color before rotate) 4 ) Increase the size a lot (1000%) 5 ) Rotate it 6 ) Crop it (doesn't have to be same proportional, just crop it as tight as you can) 7 ) Resize it back to the original size (and zoom in) 8 ) Look at the picture and make the player sprite definition look like it This wasn't perfect, but was close enough. Note that playerpal 2 has 90 degree rotation ability already. It just doesn't have 22.5 and 45 degree rotation.

Yeah, I was thinking the TIA schematics were open to the public I just didn't know for sure. I was really excited about putting a cart slot on my flashback 2 but I just have so many actual 2600 systems it doesn't seem worth it for me yet. If there ever was a full functioning 2600 clone (with original 6 or 4 switch design) with composite RCA video out I would be tempted to pick one up. It would have to be completely compatible with all the games though. Even better than that you can get the real thing. I know Longhorn Engineer sells A/V mods for the original 2600s and revamps them: see this post

Yeah, that stuff was way out of hand. It's like the people that are pissy with waiters and waitresses because they feel there some sense of entitlement to being a customer. I'll be the first to say that I complain if I get really bad service and you can tell the person just doesn't care. However, when you see how hard people are working, you know that they really care about the service, and you know they are doing a great job, I totally respect and admire that. Curt is definitely one of the good guys, and the FB2 was one of the greatest products ever made IMO. Yes, a good part of that is also because the 2600 was one of the greatest products ever made, but the FB2 could have sucked in so many ways, and it didn't, because Curt made it true to the original as much as he could. It was even intentionally hackable which made it way cool. Well, I'll keep dreaming of the day when the new system is done. I can see it now. Curt kisses it before placing it in the box waving at it as it goes down the assembly line... it gets carefully handled with white gloves and FedEx'd overnight on a concord ... arrives at my house in a gift-wrapped box with a nice bow around it... Mmmmmmmm

Turns out I was wrong. The reason they stop posting anything in the forums was because of some bad apples: see 1368747 and 1347119

Well now I know who to blame for Curt's disappearance. I'm glad it wasn't me! At least I hope it wasn't me. If it was me I will run far away.